swissmiss

Beaker is a new business and culture magazine that launched today. It is for the idea generation and aims to equip entrepreneurs, technologists and executives to act on their ideas while navigating between the stages of idea to product, product to market, and the first few years of a startup.

Beaker plans to create and curate articles on early stage operations, startup culture and technology trends from around the world.

Amrit Richmond is the brainchild behind the project. I am excited to see where she will take it. Congratulations, Amrit!

Beaker

Do yourself a favor and check out Dropmark, a dead simple, cloud based, brand-new collaboration tool.

(make sure to read the last paragraph of this post!)

Dropmark is the brainchild of my studio mate Skylar Challand, founder of Oak Studios.

He had the idea for the app a few years ago, while doing lots of photo research for a client. He was missing an easy way for sharing his findings, as well a way of easily retaining a link to the original source.

Skylar went to work and built the tool himself. He’s been using it for over a year, privately and found it to be perfect for collecting project inspiration and research. It also makes a dead simple way to share wireframes and comps with clients. Web site comps work particularly well as clients can zoom into images and scroll as if it were a real website. And everything is private by default, so you don’t have to worry. Invited viewers receive an e-mail with a special URL to view without having to sign up.

Naturally, they found that a lot of design firms would be using the product. But their user base hardly stops there.

At its core, Dropmark is a simple was to organize and collaborate with anyone in the cloud. They managed to make it simple enough that anyone could use it.

Everything is collection-based, so you won’t feel like your important information into a bottomless pit (unless of course, you create a collection called “Bottomless Pit” and drop everything in there). You can drag any types of files right from your desktop (or the web) into these collections—documents, website links, images, audio, video, text, anything.

Some surprisingly magical stuff happens when you start combining these together.

Let’s say you want to send a friend a few links to look at. Instead of sending an e-mail and pasting in a bunch of links, you can create a Dropmark collection and instantly have one short link that you can send instead. And the collection and be updated at any time.

Similarly you can use Dropmark as a replacement for bookmarks. Enter in a few URLs, or use our browser extensions & bookmarklets to create an organized, visual bookmarking experience that is completely private. Or curate some links and put them out there for the world, like this Lorem Ipsum Collection.

Drag and drop a handful of photos and you instantly have a slideshow. You can it make publicly viewable, or keep it private and invite close friends and family to collaborate and add their own photos. You can even drag photos right from iPhoto on Mac, and sync them (or any other Dropmark photo collection) back.

Click on this screenshot to view a selection of CreativeMornings talks I gathered in a Dropmark Collction

Watch Ben Chestnut’s CreativeMornings talk in this Dropmark fullscreen window.

One of my favorite features is audio and video playback. Anyone can mix together some video clips from YouTube and Vimeo (together at last!), or even uploaded your computer and you instantly have a video playlist. Hit play on the first video, put your browser in fullscreen mode, and Dropmark will play each video one by one.

Dropmark is a blank slate for your content in the cloud.

Dropmark is technically in beta until Mar. 1st, but they’ve created an invite code for swissmiss readers: Sign up here and use”swissmiss”. The invite code gets early access + 1 GB free storage if used before March 1st 2012.